Everything Old is Old Again

Welcome to Wednesday, futurists.

Whoever said "history rhymes but doesn't repeat" needs an urgent reality check on today's headlines. Welcome to 2020. Or perhaps 2008? Or... whenever this temporal loop is, because it's decidedly not 2025.

Today's news cycle feels less like fresh content and more like a curatorial retrospective:

🍁 Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick forecast a re-re-reprieve on Canadian and Mexican tariffs 24 hours after implementation. Again. 

💸 Ryan Breslow, the wunder-kid of one-click payments, reclaims his throne at Bolt—Silicon Valley's prodigal son narrative playing on repeat. Guess the Paypal mafia didn’t off him after all.

📰 Kevin Rose, fresh off his latest NFT drop/flop, has resurrected Digg alongside former nemesis Alexis Ohanian—Web 1.0's answer to superhero universe crossovers. Both Ohanian and Rose have had Bored Apes; this is a case of Web 1.0 + 1.0 = Web 3.0?

🧵 Joann Fabrics, having already experienced bankruptcy's scythe once before, surrenders permanently. RIP. (pun intended).

🎯 Target becomes the latest harbinger of retail's persistent malaise, though it is curiously silent on whether culture wars contributed to its forecasting woes.

And, if none of that were concerning enough for you, we get to worry about the economy's health yet again: Target is the latest retailer to turn in a less-than-stellar economic forecast. But they were curiously quiet about DEI boycotts.

And then there’s Apple resurrecting corecore as a ‘trends’ report. In its “new” iPad Air.

The Art of The Defresh

But the most concerning deja vu this week was watching Apple ‘defresh’ its line of iPad Air devices with the baffling easter egg inclusion of a faux CoreCore trends report.

Apple’s apologist audience was once the crowd that wrote such a trend report. The high-minded “oat milk elite” strategist-type; a discerning, high-income person who cared about design and had a cushy job that afforded them the ability to purchase expensive design books.

But Apple's recent lack of innovation is palpable; not just with their hardware and software launches, but in the fact that they’re turning the core audience who used to be their apologists into critics. The backlash began among the oatmilk elite with the ‘crush ad’ that debuted last May. Apple responded by pulling down the ad. 

But the months that followed have not been kind. The botched launch of Apple Intelligence, their poor public reception to Genmoji out-of-home ads, and today’s dated reference to corecore. 

Corecore as a “trend” began on TikTok during the pandemic as a series of broll nonsequiturs. The attempt at showing iPad as a professional creative collaboration tool is valid, but this is not how creative strategists would ever use such a tool.

And this is Apple’s persistent problem, over and over again: try talking to actual people before you put out an ad. Or before you do anything at all.

From the screenshot in the ad: “in the past, trends would return approximately every 20 years.” In the present, Apple products are recycled every six months.

— Phillip